Look for her in the white
     spaces between his words, a moon
     known only by reflection, her story 
     a glimpse of all those disappeared.
  (The Mad Woman of Amlia)

He is a singer of times of unexpected awareness when the land shows us metaphors which are told as stories to ourselves, and those we love:

  ...That sky 
     is inside me now.
     It is all I have to say to you. 
  (Letter)

Story Hunger crosses seascapes and land, uniting Celtic and Aleut myths and themes, traveling a line woven so very long ago, the unraveling is all that is left to us. These are poems of sure craft and great love.

About the Author

For seventeen years, Jerah Chadwick has been a resident of the Aleutian Island of Unalaska, where he first came to raise goats and write, living in an abandoned WWII military compound eight miles walking from town. Since 1988 he has taught for and directed the University of Alaska extension program for the Aleutian/Pribilof island region.  He holds degrees from Lake Forest College (Illinois) and the University of Alaska Fairbanks and is a recipient of an Alaska State Council on the Arts Writing Fellowship.  Chadwick's poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and Ireland; and he is the author of three chapbooks, including The Dream Horse (Seal Press, Seattle) and From the Cradle of Storms (State Street, New York).  In 1983, he served as guest editor for Contemporary Art and Writing of the Aleutian Islands (Penumbra, Ontario).

A Poem from Story Hunger

Story Hunger
after the Irish

Whether for seal or shark oil,
or tallow, the lamp, too,
a hungry mouth. How its wick

cast the room through
winter nights: faces gleaming, bodies
leaning from the shadows as if

from just below the surface.
Outside, wind, the restlessness
of water, breaking

or raging storm. Think
of the table's patient stance,
something to chew

off little bits of winter,
dark held like a wafer
at the centre of the flame.

Who would taste
the light's portion took blindness
on his tongue. Who starving would eat

grasped as the drowning do,
danger to whatever could be.
And our bowls' emptiness,

the way imagining sets
off, stumbling
land legs of a possible world.

(© Copyright Jerah Chadwick 1999)
 
 
 
 

Salmon Poetry, an Irish publisher, has recently released two books by Alaskan writers:  Story Hunger by Jerah Chadwick and A Curb in Eden by Joseph Enzweiler. This is Chadwick's first collection and Enzweiler's third.  We owe Jessie Lendennie of Salmon Poetry our gratitude for publishing these two collections. I know of no Alaskan publisher who will even read a poetry manuscript, and that includes the University of Alaska Press.

Chadwick, who has lived on Unalaska Island for many years, has a keen interest in history and myth, two things that are missing from most contemporary poetry. Chadwick's language is terse and for the most part devoid of ornament.  He uses simile and metaphor sparingly but to great effect.  His world is one where water is 'fractured slat'' and falling snow is 'like static.'  It is a harsh world with a brutal history.  This collection includes several powerful poems about the Russian conquest of the Aleutians and their near decimation of the Aleut population.  One of the book's strongest poems is based on the diary of Nebu Tatuguchi a Japanese physician who was killed during the battle for Attu during the Second World War. Tatuguchi's diary was found and translated by Army Intelligence after the battle, but it is too lengthy to quote here.

While his world is often comprised of, all the shades of grey, the local incantatory color, Chadwick believes in the redemptive power of story or myth. For Chadwick, a story is  the everyday and ancient rewoven.'  It redeems the world.

A fair number of the poems in Story Hunger have an Irish setting, but Chadwick's concerns remain the same; it is interesting to note that the Irish, as well as the Aleut, came very close to losing their language and culture because of foreign conquest, but their stories survived.  In the following poem, Chadwick weaves
elements from Aleut and Irish culture to great effect.

  Selchie:  Seal Man

  Perhaps he has surprised the red headed woman
  wandering the beach, or she him
  resting among the rocks, the stranger
  emerging from shed skins, his hair black,
  face less flat without its halo
  of hide, his dark eyes
  gentle or not.  What happens next

  anyone's guess:  attempted flight
  or conversation.  And their grappling,
  gentle or not, she remembers the ocean
  smells of him, his squat legs stepping
  back into fur, wizened leather
  for his feet, the hood
  drawn up over his head
  as he walked off into the animal
  dark core of her story.

  So the story‚s told,
  not of some Inuit drifter, but seals
  nudging a brother‚s boat from the rocks,
  his nets laden, the child
  born out of wedlock, his liquid dark gaze.

While Chadwick's language is often lean, Enzweiler's is usually lush and sensuous. He is a poet who loves the sound of words and their many levels of meaning.

Enzweiler's A Curb in Eden is a book length poem of innocence and experience.  It begins with the poet looking back to the first time he fell in love.  He writes, '"Around me the mud/ smelled of spring and sour straw/ and the potholes shivered with rain."  He was fifteen; however, his world was soon to change with Vietnam and the death of his mother:

  After my mother died, my father
  waited in his years, obedient to despair.
  The house went with him;
  the grass grew long and bloomed.
  Our apple trees rotted in sweetness.
  A thin ghost moved in everything he knew.
  His pigeons vanished too, a whir of wings
  that was once the sound of evening.
  Only the sky remained, a curving silence.

Innocence leads to experience which returns to a tempered innocence again and again.  The following stanza is from "Aeneas" a poem that begins with the youthful poet feeling 'immortal in my white tuxedo':

  Then you, father in front of me
  cigarette in your mouth and one eye shut.
  Each step ever taken led us here,
  each bit of love forgotten, all the nights
  I fell asleep in the ships of your storied
  to the moment left to right  you cinch
  down the sash below my coat, pin it
  at the side as I wait with arms raised
  like a gull.  I watch your hands move,
  how young they are, forearms thin and muscled
  from your work.  You straighten my collar,
  pull back from a curl of smoke to look at me.

At the end of the poem, the now middle-aged poet addresses the two central figures of the poem, his now deceased father and his first love who has become a symbol of redemption:

  You pass again that curb in Eden
  and smile, and I am always turning
  to see you in the moving sky.
  Mystery is a long ride,
  but there‚s a warm seat next to you
  and a prairie far as the sun.

  My father rides too.  He is waving,
  the luggage of his heart at last put down.
  I‚ll be with him soon,
  take his workman hands, young as lions
  in mine, and look back to the lot
  in spring where I turned and stood once
  with new clothes in the mud of innocence.

This is a powerful poem.  After reading a book of poetry, I always ask myself if it is worth reading again.  My answer is yes to both of these books.  Chadwick and Enzweiler are Alaskan poets worthy of our attention and admiration.
 

(You can remove it later if you change your mind!)